Caterpillar - one of the world’s largest maker of construction and
mining equipment - used a subsidiary in Switzerland to avoid paying $2.4
billion in taxes over a period of 13 years, according to a new U.S.
Senate report titled ‘Caterpillar’s Offshore Tax Strategy.’

The
report was issued as part of a Senate Subcommittee investigation to
highlight different methods of tax avoidance used various U.S. companies
like Apple, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft among others. A 2014 report
by Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic
Policy revealed that many corporations actually pay far less than the legal rate of 35 percent of profits – in fact many pay nothing at all, because of the many tax loopholes and special breaks that they exploit.

Until
the year 2000, 85 percent of Caterpillar sales were conducted from the
company headquarters in Illinois with the rest made by foreign
subsidiaries. With the help of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), an
international tax consulting firm, Caterpillar set up a subsidiary named
CSARL in Geneva in 1999 to handle sales for replacement parts, allowing
Caterpillar to reduce its U.S. tax bill by an estimated $300 million
each year. However, out of 8,300 employees “employed” by CSARL, 4,900
were in the U.S. and only 65 were physically employed in Switzerland.

All
told, Caterpillar paid PwC $55 million for helping it transfer $8
billion of profits to CSARL between 1999 and 2012, according to the
Senate report, following the reorganization in 1998.

For
example Daniel Schlicksup, former global tax strategy manager, sent an
email in January 2007 to the company’s ethics officers noting that
approximately $1 billion in profits from a U.S. division had been
incorrectly attributed to CSARL. A year later, Schlicksup sent another
email to Robin Beran, the head of the Caterpillar’s tax department,
requesting that the matter be discussed with the board.

“With all
due respect, the business substance issue related to the CSARL Parts
Distribution is the pink elephant issue worth a Billion dollars on the
balance sheet. . . I have been asking for more than a year if we have
memos with proper facts and analysis,” wrote Schlicksup.

Instead of responding to his requests, company management transferred Schlicksup to a different division. On June 12, 2009, Schlicksup filed a whistleblower lawsuit against Caterpillar
alleging that the company had improperly attributed at least $5.6
billion of profits from the sales of spare parts to a unit in Geneva.
The company settled the lawsuit out of court in 2012.

Julie Lagacy, a vice president in the Caterpillar’s finance services division, defended the company at a Senate hearing,
chaired by Levin, earlier this month. “Our average effective tax rate
is 29 percent, ” she said. “That’s one of the highest for a
multinational manufacturing company – 3 percentage points higher than
the average effective rate for U.S. corporations.

Beran, who also
testified at the hearing, complained that the company was being
unfairly targeted by the federal government. “We are under continuous
examination,” he said. “The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) literally
sits right outside my office.”

Companies
like Caterpillar constitute a powerful lobby against changes to the tax
code, donating generously to politicians on all sides of the political
spectrum. So it is not surprising that a proposed reform bill – the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act – sponsored by Levin - has stalled in the Senate.